


we are for each other

by carrythesky



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Denial of Feelings, F/M, Feelings Realization, Tears, and also, happy ending? i don't know her, tps2 speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 12:19:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17446859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carrythesky/pseuds/carrythesky
Summary: He doesn't kiss her.





	we are for each other

He doesn’t kiss her.

 

.

 

The first time he wants to, he’s handcuffed to the table and she’s _yelling_ at him, _all you will do, the rest of your life, is rot in a goddamn jail cell_ —

 

Her eyes are blazing and her chest’s heaving, she’s breathing so hard. He hates himself immediately afterwards but for a sharp second he’s somewhere else, getting his ass handed to him by another woman with fire and grit gnashed in her teeth, and she’s screaming bloody murder at him and he _likes_ that shit, he wants it.

 

The roil in his gut snaps him back to reality, self-hatred sluicing through his veins like ice. He crushes the thought down like a compactor, into the shit and sludge and every other thing rotting beneath his ribs, and the next time she yells, screams at him —

 

(Bullets and thunder overhead. Smoke in his lungs, when he remembers how to breathe. His face is in her hair. He smells coconut and lavender, and drags her out of the room by her elbow, his thumb pressed to the jut of bone.)

 

— _you do this and you’re dead to me, do you hear me?_

 

He feels nothing.

 

.

 

It almost works. He almost convinces himself.

 

.

 

He's scanning the paper one day, flipping through sports and entertainment when his eyes snag on a name in the local crime section. _Karen Page,_ the byline reads.

 

He stares at it until his coffee goes cold.

 

.

 

 _Fuckin’_ waste of time, he thinks, cinching his blanket tight against the mid-afternoon chill. Maybe she didn’t go into the office today. Maybe she worked from home, maybe she took a cab back, maybe she’ll take one look at him and shoot him point-blank anyways because he’s supposed to be dead, wasn’t that the last fucking thing he said to her —

 

She’s almost past him by the time he sees her. He’d know that blonde hair anywhere, the click-click staccato of her heels on the sidewalk.

 

“Hey, lady —”

 

She doesn’t shoot him.

 

.

 

She’s moving before he can blink. Her arms twine around his shoulders and it’s a reflex, the way his hand slides across her back to rest at her waist, how he buries his face in the crook of her neck and breathes, just breathes. He’s in Karen Page’s apartment and she’s hugging him and everything is coming into focus, like he’s underwater and kicking for the surface, the world sharpening into clarity as soon as he hits air.

 

She makes him feel so, so alive.

 

He digs his nails into his palm and it’s enough to ground him back to reality. There’s work to do and no matter what happens, how all this shit ends, it won’t be here. Not with her. Half of him is buried in the cold ground and the other half —

 

He’s only holding onto her with one hand. It’s easy enough to let go.

 

.

 

It’s the thin breeze that kicks up and teases a strand of hair loose from her scarf, the way her voice is building like a wave and finally crests, breaks against his own —

 

_You don’t have to keep me safe —_

 

Fury surges up his sternum. He’s knows he’s shouting and there’s a loud rushing sound in his ears and when Karen flinches, that’s when he cracks apart. It takes him a moment to recognize the the vice-like tightness in his gut and chest.

 

He’s — afraid. More than he’s been in a long time.

 

He doesn’t have the words. All he has is this clenching fear, the curdling certainty that if he’ll unravel completely if he loses her too. He has his fear and he has everything else, and something in-between pushes him forward, pushes him to kiss the soft hollow of her cheek and pretend like it’s enough.

 

He walks home with both hands empty, palms open at his sides.

 

.

 

(The world is falling down around him, but he has this hollowed sphere of time, a moment that extends as far as her skin and his breath and the two of them, alive, _alive_. He thinks he might — for a brief nanosecond, a splinter between breaths, he thinks about closing the space between them, touching his lips to the corner of her mouth and tasting the salt there, tasting every word they’ve kept in their throats, _want, need_ —)

 

She lets go, this time.

 

.

 

He didn’t tell her —

 

.

 

They’re standing by the water again. The sun is in his eyes so he dips his head, glances up at her from an angle.

 

Over a year. That’s how long it’s been since he last saw her.

 

She looks different. Her hair’s shorter, falling just to her shoulders, and her face is a little fuller, cheeks more round. Eyes as bright as he remembers, but there’s something there, something he can’t quite place.

 

“ ‘M not sure what to say,” he admits.

 

She moves to sit on the bench, the same one where she agreed to help him a lifetime ago. “Start from the beginning,” she says.

 

He does. Tells her everything, starting with Billy and Kandahar and his family, his government pardon and him stumbling through the aftermath, trying to find normal. Amy, and the fuckin’ psychopath that’s after her. Billy, again.

 

“I couldn’t put him down,” he says. “Piece of shit stood by while they killed my family, yeah? Did everything but pull the goddamn trigger himself—” he shakes his head a little, braces his arms against the railing. “Killing him woulda been too easy, right, and I wanted — I wanted him to suffer, Karen, I wanted him to know pain every time he looked in the mirror, know it was me who caused it.”

 

She’s still looking at him, when he turns, her gaze hard and a little distant and that’s when it hits him. She’s — disappointed, in him. One year, three hundred and sixty-five fuckin’ days, and he’s still right where he was, circling the goddamn drain. Nothing’s changed.

 

_I want there to be an after, for you._

 

He’s failed her, again.

 

He feels it then, how tired he is. How heavy his shoulders are. He sees it all in fragments, every moment since that day at the carousel that’s led him to this one, and thinks —

 

“What do you want me to say?” Her voice is tight but there’s no malice in it. “You know,” she presses, “you know how I feel about this, you know I never wanted this for you — so why am I here? Why now, after all this time?”

 

 _Say it, you coward, say_ — “I miss you.”

 

Silence threads between them, heavy with everything he isn’t saying. Her hands are clasped on her lap and she glances down at them before saying, “I miss you too, Frank. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t do what you do and continue to expect me to be there for you. I might not be, one day. I almost didn’t come this time.” Every word is a knife to his gut, twisting at all the soft and vulnerable places he keeps hidden away, but he keeps looking at her, doesn’t stop looking. “You’re a good man, Frank, but you’re wrestling with a giant, and I can’t watch you do it anymore. I understand that this is who you are, but —” and that’s when the steel barrier she’s put up finally starts to crack her eyes going wide and all the hurt and anger and hope there blurring like watercolors — “We both deserve more, Frank.”

 

It’s those five words that break him. He can hear the anguish in her voice, sees her lower lip quivering, and he’s across the space between them in two steps, sinking down to his knees on the cold concrete.

 

“Hey,” he rasps, gathering her hands up in his, the ridges of her knuckles pressed to his palms. “Karen, hey — you were right, okay, you were right about everything, you — told me that’s all this is, right? Life, it’s just fighting not to be alone, and I’ve been fighting, Karen, but for all the wrong shit, and I just —”

 

She drops her head, hair sliding over her face like a curtain, and when she looks up again there’s a few strands stuck to her cheeks, caught in the wet of her tears.

 

She’s so beautiful it hurts.

 

“You’re everything, Karen.” His knees are going numb and his throat aches but he pushes the words up anyways, blinks back the heat behind his eyelids and lifts the tips of her fingers to his lips — “You’re everything.”

 

“Frank—”

 

She’s crying harder now, and when he licks his lips and tastes the salt he knows he is, too. All he wants — all he wants is to stay here and kiss the soft pads of her fingers, the curve of her wrist, all he wants is to gather her up in his arms and hold her by the water and tell her everything, all the little things he’s hoarded since the moment she marched over that red tape and dragged him back from the edge —

 

Karen was halfway right. One of them deserves more, and it’s not him.

 

He stands swiftly, her hands slipping out of his and he feels the loss of physical contact like a gut-punch. “Take care, Karen.”

 

.

 

He lets go, with both hands —

**Author's Note:**

> idk what happened here, it started off innocently enough with me just wanting to write about all the times frank thinks about kissing karen but doesn't and SOMEHOW it spiraled into this?? I'm feeling very nervous about this upcoming season so maybe this was my way of preemptively breaking my own heart before the show can ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> (also also I shamelessly swiped the "wrestling with a giant" line from red dead redemption 2, still cryin)
> 
> I'm on [tumblr!](https://carry-the-sky.tumblr.com/), come say hi/yell at me!


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